Back when the Church was still much more of a force in the world, the Left, pursuing an agenda packed full of immodesty, immorality, and pornography to tear down the moral universe of Christendom, attacked such wholesome entities as the Legion of Decency or Father Peyton’s Rosary Crusade for good morals as being opposed to supposedly sacrosanct free speech. Free Speech was ostensibly such a good in and of itself that nothing, not even the fate of souls and the moral standards of an entire culture, could stand in its way. Thus, pornography was pushed into the mainstream, and little children were taught all manner of filthiness to insure that great gift of God, their innocence, would be ruined at a vulnerable stage, making them far more pliable for vicious demagogues pushing an unholy agenda.

Well, that was then, and this is now. With the Church beyond dysfunctional, nearly broken (for all practical purposes, a non-entity in the cultural zeitgeist), and virtually all the ancient moral standards and societal taboos totally shattered – that is to say, with the goal of the destruction of Christendom nearly obtained – NOW suddenly the Left is increasingly positing that free speech is not sacrosanct, is not a good in itself, and should, in fact, be jettisoned in furtherance of the broader leftist agenda. This agenda, as a previous post noted, is becoming more and more nakedly apparent as the standing up of a new, demonic religion, a religion of endless guilt for sins but no redemption save that offered by the Left- whatever dystopic utopia they are pushing for at the moment.

The shift against free speech and towards a totalitarian implementation of the leftist ideology is given evidence in thousands, probably millions of tweets, videos, blog post, and media articles. One recent article was more stultifyingly obvious than the rest, calling for deconstruction of “free speech protections” and the criminalization of speech the Left finds offensive, in this case, so-called islamophobia. It also highlights a belief I have long had, that some find counterintuitive – as push comes to shove, after (and if) Christendom is driven underground again, the Left will happily don the hijab and heed the call to prayer and endorse islam formally. This article endorses dogmatic claims of islam as fact, something I would wager a mighty sum the author would never grant to Christianity. See for yourself:

On March 23, New Zealand awoke to the horrific news of yet another terrorist attack, this time in London.

A deranged individual ploughed a car into innocent pedestrians and brutally stabbed a police officer to death before being shot. Five people died, including the attacker.

The Twittersphere was soon abuzz with conjecture and accusation. Who was to blame? What were the motives?

I felt sick as I read comments saying “Islam is to blame” and “it must be another Muslim”. [And with excellent reason, as the vast, vast, vast majority of such attacks are perpetrated by muslims. Given the location and the means of executing the atrocity, people had very good reason to assume a muslim was the perpetrator, and, guess what! He was.]

The fact that the attacker was a Muslim is irrelevant. The issue is that Islamophobia was the first response. [Oh for crying out loud. Muslims are responsible for attacks that kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of others, mostly Christians, around the world annually. No other religion comes close. Decrying this as “islamophobia” is just the bleating of an ideologue who has nothing to support their claim, so they shout epithets.]

If you are a Muslim, you continually have to defend your faith against people who accuse it of being a dangerous and violent set of ideas. [And rightly so, because it has been proven, over its roughly 1,350 year history, to be exactly that, a dangerous and violent set of ideas.]Islam is the religion of peace; anyone who understands this knows it has no part in the ideology of ISIS……..[Do you think the nebbish milquetoast wisp of a (white) man author would EVER grant such to Christianity, that it is THE religions of peace. Not A religion of peace, but THE religion of peace. This guy is halfway to being a muslim convert, and entirely because his ideology places muslims very, very high on the victim pyramid conveying instantaneous moral status and authority. These people will be the death of us, literally and figuratively.]

………The misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic hate speech directed at oppressed groups is damaging to society – and with the rise of Donald Trump’s brand of politics, it is also being legitimised.

So, what does this have to do with free speech? And how might things change for the better?

Well, there is some hope. The Canadian parliament has passed the M-103 motion, which calls on the government to condemn Islamophobia. It is the silver lining of a dark and depressing cloud, and it is something I think New Zealand should seek to not only emulate but improve.

Our Government should look to criminalise not only Islamophobia, but racist rhetoric and the criticism of feminism and LGBTQAA+ rights. [Basically, any speech that attacks and undermines his leftist ideology should be made illegal. That’s what they have done in all the leftist “paradises” from 16th century Muenster to 1870 Paris to the FSU and up to today.]

Free speech is all well and good, but it should not be defended at the expense of minority groups. [And he and his cohort, naturally, get to define both who is a “minority,” and whether certain speech somehow offends against him/them.]

Nothing quells fear and hatred like making it illegal, and if we stop opposing progressive values then surely the constant fighting will stop too.

Spoken like a true believer. The ideological motive behind all this is revealed in this final paragraph, “progressive values” are so perfect and sublime they will lead to peace and concord for all, if we could only shut up those blasted recalcitrant unholy heretical right wingers once and for all.

Whether declaring vast swaths of perfectly normal political and cultural speech/criticism to be illegal would produce less “fear and hatred” is extremely debatable. While members of the leftist political coalition might be happy, millions of others would be extremely aggrieved. What he means to say is it would “quell the fear and hatred” of those he finds politically and culturally acceptable, ie., members of the leftist coalition. The rest can just go hang, perhaps figuratively at first, but eventually, literally.

The writer comes across as extremely young, naive, and indoctrinated. He doesn’t argue coherently so much as regurgitate talking points he’s picked up from the mainstream media in hyper-leftist New Zealand (one of the first Western countries to essentially completely destroy their capability to defend themselves, militarily – I kid you not – devolving this responsibility on their friendly neighbor Australia).

Wherever the Left has gained hold – oh, and always for the good of others, even as it makes those others utterly miserable – it has resulted in a total crackdown on civil liberties that were one of the great gifts of the Church to the world. Given leftism’s endemic anti-Christian nature, I guess this should not be surprising. What is amazing is the Left’s ability to dissemble and exist in total hypocrisy, even regarding its own history. Are today’s leftists, heirs of the once sacrosanct “free speech movement” of the 60s and 70s embarrassed at totally turning their back on this once vital precept? Of course not, both because they are wholly ignorant of history, and wouldn’t care if they weren’t.

Because it’s always been about power, power for them, over you, because they are totally convinced of their own innate superiority in every possible way – morally, intellectually, artistically, culturally, politically, socially……everything. Being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry.

History may or may not repeat itself, but historical situations do recur. In this time of incredible crisis in the Church, it is helpful sometimes to review the history of previous crises. The protestant revolt in the 16th century was a time when it appeared all of Christendom might fall into error. The parallels between that disastrous period of time and our own are perhaps greater than many realize. Whether the condition of the Church today is better or worse than that of, say, the dark year of 1560, when Calvinists very nearly gained France to their side through a narrowly foiled secret plot (endorsed by Calvin himself) to murder not only the French king but dozens of Catholic nobles, is difficult to say. What has remained constant between that time and this is the tendency for bad Catholics to make up the lead ranks of the revolutionaries. I guess the primary difference is that in the current disastrous state of the Church, as in the Arian crisis, the revolutionaries lack the honesty and decency to formally separate themselves from union with the Church, instead pretending they represent a “truer,” “purer,” “reformed” Faith. Of course, much of the reason for that has been the fault of numerous timorous pontiffs, who have lacked the nerve to openly challenge the modernist-progressive cabal by excommunicating them as they, and the faithful, so richly deserve.

At any rate, in keeping with today’s focus on the current religion of leftist secular paganism and it’s historical antecedents, this excerpt from pp. 285-6 of William Thomas Walsh’s Philip II:

One of the biggest factors in causing all this corruption was the interference of the State, newly conscious of its unity and power, in the affairs of the Church. Priests were badly disciplined because there were too many political bishops. There were political bishops because kings, even in Spain, had seldom missed an opportunity to wring privileges from unwilling Popes when they had them in their power. Often the Pope had to allow the King to name the bishops, as the price of having Christianity preached at all, and he chose the lesser of the two evils. In view of all this, it is strange that men go on repeating cant phrases about the interference of the Church in the State in the Middle Ages. Sometimes, yes; but more often the other way around. Philip took it as a matter of course that he was to be consulted before the Pope nominated a bishop in any of his dominions. If any Pope had dared to dictate Philips appointments……..!!!!!!!

Three other facts about the corruption of the clergy are often forgotten: 1) Many of the accounts of church scandals originated with the enemies of the Church, who have been proved guilty of gross exaggerations or of downright lying. Sometimes the scandalmonger is an exposed cheat, like Llorente; sometimes a scribbler in the pay of one of the Pope’s political enemies, like the lewd neo-pagan Pontano; or a credulous retailer of indiscriminate gossip or a disappointed office-seeker. Being contemporary does not make a man truthful or reliable. In all ages there has been a continuous and curiously uniform propaganda to discredit the Church and all connected with her. Documents of the Alta Vendita, made public by the papal government of 1846, disclosed a systematic and deliberate campaign of slander. One letter said:

“Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution – the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea. The work which we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century perhaps……….Crush the enemy whoever he may be; crush the powerful by means of lies and calumny………If a prelate comes to Rome from the provinces to exercise some public function, learn immediately his character, his antecedents, above all, his defects. If he is already a declared enemy…..envelop him in all the snares you can lay under his feet; create for him one of those reputations which will frighten little children and old women…….paint him cruel and sanguinary: recount regarding him some trait of cruelty which can easily be engraved in the minds of the people.

If this was never formulated so concretely until the nineteenth century, it describes, with startling accuracy, what the enemies of the Church had been doing for centuries. It describes what they did to the reputation of Philip II.

2) It is to be noticed that when the breach occurred, it was the ignorant and corrupt priest, monk, or nun who rushed forth to join Luther and Calvin in the liberty of the new dispensation. Theodore Beza, as a Roman Catholic, is a glaring example of the too common corruption. Though not even a priest, he enjoys the incomes of two benefices, through political influence, lavishes the Church’s money on his concubine, and generally leads a vicious and dissolute life. When the Church is under attack, he hastens to join the enemy. As Calvin’s lieutenant, this “righteous” man thunders against the corruption of the Old Church, of which he was partly the cause. There is no doubt about the laxity of the monasteries of Sevilla and Valladolid, whose members embraced protestantism; nor of the degeneracy of the Augustinians in Saxony, who broke away from the Church almost to a man in 1521 (so much so that they may as well be called “Luther’s Own”). In England it was the reformed Observantine Franciscans who withstood Henry VIII even to death, while the relaxed Conventuals and other badly disciplined monks and priests formed the nucleus of the Church of England. The first protestants, as a rule, were bad Catholics. [very much as we have seen in the Church since the crisis exploded at and after Vatican II, the already soft and corrupted orders have fallen into total dissolution, while a few observant orders – and a number of new ones, clinging to the disciplines of the past – have maintained their own, or grown substantially.]

———–End Quote———-

So, contrary to what you have almost certainly been taught from both teacher and toob, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was not simply a corrupt, effete, cynical, self-serving institution enriching itself off the enforced donations o f a benighted peasantry desperate to believe in any kind of Good News, no matter how falsely presented it may have been. Or more accurately, to the extent that description was ever true, the Church was very often not to blame for that state of things. The State had a great deal to answer for in whatever deficiencies were present in Christendom on the eve of the protestant revolt.

The campaign of deliberate smear by vituperation practiced by protestant-leftists then……is it much different from the epithets of “Nazi,” “racist,” “islamophobe,” “sexist,” etc., we hear now? It seems Alinsky was far from the first Alinskyite – the protestants and masons of the Alta Vendita had him beat by centuries.

Walsh’s history is heavy, at times ponderous, and a bit too focused on minute details (do I really need 1 ½ pages – 700 words – on the exotic gowns worn by Philip II, his third wife Isabel, and their entourage at their wedding?) but it is undeniably Catholic in outlook. He is very similar to Warren Carroll in that respect, but did not have some of the small, but still noticeable, baggage that Carroll carried with him (a too great deference to the post-conciliar ethos, and a tendency to gloss over certain topics). Philip II is Walsh’s magnum opus, but I look forward to reading other books by the author. History has always been my first love, and even though this is a trying read at times, I am learning a great deal. I plan on reading the rest of this author’s oeuvre as I can.

They still don’t seem to understand, or – especially, given that this is the very secular-leaning “conservative” Weekly Standard – want to understand, that not only has leftism “transformed” into a religion, it was always deliberately conceived as a false counterfeit of true religion in order to oppose, subvert, replace, and ultimately destroy (if possible) Catholicism.

I’ve had this confirmed for me in many ways of late, not the least of which is reading William Thomas Walsh’s massive biography of His Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain. Walsh, too (writing in the 20s and 30s), assessed the protestant revolt as being the first mass outbreak of leftism, and understood that leftism initially took on the trappings of religion, even the Christian religion, the better to sell itself and achieve maximum impact against its principal target, the Church. In addition, just as it is almost impossible to separate the modern Left from modern Judaism, the Jewish impact on the protestant revolt may have been much larger than is generally recognized. More on that, perhaps, later today.

All of which makes this report from the Weekly Standard at least slightly ironic? Nevertheless, it is quite gratifying to see (especially coming from a Catholic journalist) that some of the things I’ve realized for years are starting to become more widely recognized:

One of the more prescient essays in recent years is Jody Bottum’s “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas,” which I’m proud to say was published in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The essay posits that religious ideas are transforming politics as we know it, only instead of the hand-wringing about the Moral Majority or the George W. Bush administration’s supposed attempts to impose theocracy, it’s the left that is, ahem, “culturally appropriating” religious ideas to suit their own attempts to seize power. [They’ve been doing so for 500 years. But the religious nature of the Left has become blatantly obvious of late.]

Take ethnicity, which has become a matter of original sin. Unlike the Judeo-Christian belief, however, this sin does not apply to all of humanity. “So profound is the sin, in fact, that not even its proponents escape. The more they are aware of white privilege, the more they see it everywhere, even in themselves,” writes Bottum. He quotes an essay of University of Texas professor Robert Jensen, who wrote: “There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased.” [Jensen has been a literal nut embarrassing the University of Texas for a quarter century or more. This Jensen creature is the only guy I ever met who talked himself into becoming a sodomite in order to better conform to his political ideology. I am not much exaggerating. He is nuts.]

Even Andrew Sullivan recently reached this conclusion, when he recently examined “intersectionality,” the left-wing buzzword du jour, which he accurately describes as “neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power.” Sullivan further observes that intersectionality “is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a ‘smelly little orthodoxy,’ and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., ‘check your privilege,’ and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay.”…….. [In fact, this emergence of obviously religious leftism has come as a result of the steady retreat of Christianity and the growing influence of the Left on society. This is how the Left behaves when it comes very close to power, dropping the trappings of supposed reasoned argument and appeals to false intellectualism for much more nakedly dogmatic, emotionally-laden claims.]

……….The University of Regina is asking its male students to own up to their toxic masculinity, and they’re setting up a confessional booth—similar to those in Catholic churches—where guys can confess their sins of “hypermasculinity.”………[How does one express a firm purpose of amendment against masculinity? I’m sure you can imagine the life-shattering behaviors that could result.]

……….Certainly, the religious right has had its excesses. [Such as? Are you going to quote me Fred Phelps? But are they even genuinely religious, or “right?” Authentic Christianity has rarely been seen by most in this country, unfortunately. Very few Americans below about 70 would even have a recollection what it might have looked like in odd corners of this country, dominated by Catholicism “before the fall” of 1962-5] But if you think that’s bad, just imagine the consequences of a political system dominated by a religious left that doesn’t believe in redemption.

Oh, we don’t have to imagine, the world has seen it over and over and over. The Soviet Union, China 1949-present, Cambodia, Vietnam, Allendeist Chile, all the East European satellites of the FSU, Nazi Germany, revolutionary Spain, revolutionary France, etc., etc. Everywhere leftism as religion comes to power it leaves putrid mounts of dead bodies in its wake.

Of course, the religion of leftism has become the predominant belief set of those who claim the name Catholic over the last several decades, infecting especially the hierarchy and then trickling down from there to infect millions of souls. But a detailed analysis of that is beyond the scope of this post, and has already been done to death not only here but on hundreds of other venues.

A friend and frequent reader of this blog gave me a great quote last week – virtually everyone in the US is born a first degree mason, and a first degree wiccan, etc. That’s because this country has come to hold, culturally, politically, socially, such extraordinarily liberal and libertine ideas, and we are all so inculcated in the “normality” of these ideas from such an early age, that almost all of us emerge, even from earliest childhood, as little proto-liberals and proto-libertines, unless we are extremely fortunate and have parents who form us in opposition to the dominant cultural zeitgeist. I thought that was a really good and pithy saying, and I thank TE for sharing it.

Tonight there will be a premiere party at the campus of the University of Dallas of a new TV show directed by prioress Sister Jane Dominic Laurel and featuring nuns of the recently stood up Irving offshoot of the Dominicans of Nashville. The show is called “Praying as a Family. I don’t know anything about the program itself, all I know is that late last week an email made the rounds inviting people to attend this premiere party at the UD campus.

Details below. I do know Sister Jane Dominic has been giving some talks for women and girls at the UD campus and that those talks have been well received. I suspect the show will be faithful but probably not explicitly traditional, which I expect most readers to understand. The party is at 6:30.

Anyway, if you’re in the area and looking to have some fun tonight, here you go: